1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony communications including data network telephony and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for interacting with an interactive response unit in a call center.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the art of telephony communications, call centers exist to handle customers for contracting businesses. Call centers often employ interactive response units for screening customers and for providing self-help menus and activities for customers who do not require live interaction with an agent of the center, or prior to routing a customer to a live agent. Interactive response units may be touch-tone operated, text operated, or voice-enabled. More recently video-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) units have been developed. These systems typically push video to the caller. Current video-enabled IVR systems provide a one-way video push from enterprise or carrier to the caller. In this system the caller may select a video for viewing, and the video-enabled IVR system pushes the video to the caller's end device. The caller may view the video or interrupt the play of the video manually, but cannot provide any interactive input that indicates the caller's interest in the video or any portion of the video. If the video is an instruction on an operation, the caller is not able to point to a specific area that she wants more video or multi-media information about.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a method for interacting with a multimedia presentation served by an interactive response unit that enables the caller to get more detailed information about a feature in the presentation through interaction with the presentation.